The present invention relates generally to network load balancing, and more specifically to managing resources of a network load balancer through the use of a presence server.
Internet servers supporting mission-critical applications (i.e. financial transactions, database access, corporate intranets, etc.) must run continuously. Additionally, networks need the ability to scale performance to handle large numbers of end user requests without creating unwanted delays. Clustering provides a solution to scalability for it enables a group of independent servers to be managed as a single system.
Network load balancing distributes traffic to multiple instances of an application, each instance running on a server within the cluster. Network load balancing transparently partitions the end user requests among the internet servers. From the end user's point of view, the cluster appears to be a single internet server answering requests.
Conventionally, the network load balancer manages end user sessions; storing such information on each user's session to a database. As the number of end users utilizing an application increases, so too does the size of the database used by the network load balancer to store end user session information.